Tate
by shootingstella
Summary: Tiny scenes revolving around everyone's favorite blonde Byronic asshole.


Okay, I'm gonna update Hard to Get tonight or tomorrow, but FIRST!

this.

It's odd. And it's really only about Tate, but everyone else is there too.

I didn't create any characters for this chapter, I simply fetched some under appreciated ones from the Promo package.

And I understand that shootings are a sensitive subject. I didn't go into detail but i mention the before and after, and even without it, this is rated M for violence so please just pass on it if you're not feeling it. I won't mind.

* * *

Tate hadn't gone looking for friends that day. He'd only wanted his truck and a quiet place to play, but he got more than he bargained for when Nora scooped him up, out of harm's way and righted him on his feet again.

He was hooked on story time and relics from that day forward.

He would spend hours in the basement, looking through the possessions of the former, forever residents of his house; listening to Nora's sometimes repetitive stories.

Perhaps it was unhealthy for a child to spend his Saturdays in a dark dank basement when the California sun was waiting just outside; for a child to have such a detailed understanding of experimental medical procedures.

But his mother ignored him.

His classmates had shunned him.

And his siblings were still unaware of just how much they would need him.

So he found a bit of company and a bit of understanding among the things and people that had been left behind in the basement.

* * *

Adelaide was Tate's senior by five years, she was a bright, funny girl, unaware of the way circumstance would eventually break her.

Nathan was a sinister child, three years older than Tate. Pale, but not like Tate who preferred indoors. Limited to the indoors but certainly not because he preferred it.

And Beau was the baby; the furthest thing from perfect their mother had seen yet.

Hugo was an average man, nothing like the hopeful teenager Constance had let between her legs before marriage. Rising to the occasion of an unplanned and unfortunate family tends to crush a guy's soul in all sorts of special ways.

Still, Tate looked up to his father; felt that he was Hugo's only real child. It was a selfish, petty thought that he would punish himself for, but how could he help it? He was the only little Langdon who looked anything like their father. (To be honest Nathan bore an unsettling resemblance to their mother, but no one else.) So late at night, after a round of disappointment fueled beatings had been doled out to all but the perfect son, Tate would curl up in his bed and hope, (not pray, he was smarter than that) that his father would find the balls to leave, and find the decency to take Tate with him located somewhere close by.

* * *

Tate was 6 when his father did finally leave; unfortunately with no little blonde sidekick in tow. Tate felt betrayed, a familiar feeling, something not outside his range of emotions. But for the first time in his short life, he felt hopeless. That was when the Langdon's left the murder house and Tate started cutting.

* * *

Since their family hadn't gone far, just one plot of suburbia to the left, Tate could stand in his new bedroom and look directly into his old bedroom. He watched, with a detached sort of interest as a new couple fucked on every surface of his familiar childhood home.

The woman, Nikki, liked it rough and her husband Sam wore a dark mask when he bent her over the desk Tate used to do his homework on.

Apparently he wasn't rough enough because on Fridays when Tate got out of school early, he made it home in time to see the woman entertaining other men, while her husband pushed paper at a nine to five.

Sam must have found out about it too somehow, because the last time he saw Nikki spread out on the desk with her husband's hand around her throat, she went limp and Sam didn't stop squeezing. Tate watched him squeeze every ounce of life out of his wife's eyes until she was gone and he hung himself from the ceiling fan with a leather belt.

Tate went outside to play when the police came, days later, after the neighborhood reported a smell, but Constance called him back inside.

"There are some things children shouldn't have to see."

* * *

Tate grew up, with an overwhelming knowledge of how desperate his family's financial situation was most of the time.

He also knew exactly what ends his mother was willing to go to, to be sure that there was dinner on the table, a cigarette between her fingers, and a bottle of gin under the sink.

It didn't make him proud though.

It didn't make him feel safe, or well taken care of.

It made him sick.

* * *

Tate stood outside his death trap adjacent home in the middle of the night, watching flames pour out of an upstairs bedroom.  
Constance was crying big fake tears and the only surviving occupant of 1120 Westerchester Place was wrapped in an emergency blanket on the side of the truck, not holding out much hope for his family's survival.

Lawrence hadn't been home when she did it.

He'd been on Tate's plastic covered sofa, fondling his gin soaked mother.

They wheeled three body bags past him and he never moved a muscle. He had no visible emotions, although there was a smear of fire engine red lipstick on his neck.

Tate smirked at that, and Larry just stared at him.

EMTs were loading his family members into the truck, but Larry couldn't seem to take his eyes off Tate.

* * *

Moving back into The Murder House was strange.

Tate supposed he should have been relieved, if not for his own sake then at least for his siblings. Eviction notices and bill collectors wouldn't plague their lives now that they had been taken under the guardianship of a homicidally negligent maniac who just happened to manage his own accounting firm.

But Tate still felt… _strange._

Nathan quipped from behind a mellow dramatic paper fan that he was 'coming home to die', pushing through the foyer with a flourish.  
Tate rolled his eyes and carried a box of books and junk to his new-old room.

After dinner that night, he went down to the basement. He'd stopped exploring years ago, once he felt that he'd seen and touched and held and broken enough things.

Getting back to the familiarity of Nora and Elizabeth and snap –pop – snap was comforting. He noticed a stack of boxes off to the left with barely any dust; plastic tea cups and a half-finished needle point.

Over the course of another half a dozen trips down stairs, he watched the stitching begin to fill in.

* * *

Nathan was twenty when he killed himself in the bathroom. Hung himself by Constance's home shopping pearls, in an outfit that screamed 'Am I pretty yet, mommy?'

It made Tate sick, but as his brother was currently dangling over his vomit receptacle of choice, he bit it back, and started snorting coke.

* * *

Beau was never Constance's favorite, but after Nathan's death, she seemed intent on destroying him. Constance never had… 'reacted well'.

After being locked up in the attic for a week, the kid got used to it; stopped fussing quite so much. But he had put up enough of a racket to warrant two noise complaints and a visit from a police officer.

A slip of Addie's tongue earned her a night in The Bad Girl Room, but it earned Constance an inspection.

The night they called to tell Constance 'her baby' was being taken away, Tate watched Larry climb the stairs into the stayed quiet. He didn't think his brother was in any danger. A flutter of foolish hope suggested that maybe he was going up there to make things better for Beau.

Tate knew his mother and Larry were aware of the curse, knew they understood the gravity of it. And he couldn't imagine (was too naïve to fathom) that they were selfish and shortsighted enough to use it as a quick fix for their own petty problems.

* * *

Nathan popped up here and there, trying on Constance's shoes, claiming he didn't know about the curse, the blessing, he called it, petting his smooth and eternally wrinkle free skin affectionately.

But Tate could see that his eyes were empty.

Tate remembered finding out about the house.

And he remembered making a point of not telling Nathan.

He could have warned him.

He could have saved him.

Maybe he was just as bad as his mother.

* * *

Sometimes it was harder than usual for Tate to tune out the house.

Nora would cry for her baby. Elizabeth would put her cold hand on his thigh. The old woman would clean his room and ask about his father. Beau was no longer corporeal but his chains still dragged along the attic floor and his breath still rattled and shook; there was no peace in this death.

There was no end for his suffering.

Tate's blood ran cold when he thought about how the world, this House, was begrudging even his innocent brother a way out.

Was there no mercy?

Well there was a bit, but Tate was shoving it up his nose as record speeds.

Maybe the high was making the aching need in his chest worse. Maybe the coke was what warped his sense of guilt into responsibility.

* * *

The basement was a funny place. Nothing was ever where you left it, but you could always find just what you needed.

Tate spent hours poring over Doctor Montgomery's poorly kept record book, the ones that had been left at the top of a box at the bottom of the stairs; waiting for him. The pages were smudged with bloodied finger prints and the leather bound cover was warped with age.  
The hand writing inside was fuzzy; suggesting a distortion of the mind that Nora was happy to confirm.

Since the first time he'd heard her story of her husband who 'took too much medicine and helped bad girls' as a child, it had evolved into something more gruesome and more refreshingly honest.

Tate thumbed over the rows of names towards the end of the ledger, women who had trusted Nora's smile and needed Charles's skill.  
Names were popping out at him as familiar, a dozen or so seemed to jump off the page.

He knew these names. He'd heard them a hundred times before, called out during attendance, rattled off at assemblies.

Some of them were generic, there was a Smith, and a Jones, and that could be anyone, but there was also a Stapleton and a Greenwell, and there was no denying the Boggs.

* * *

Another two weeks past, Tate's grades plummeted below their usual disinterested C level. He knew he was smart enough to pass, probably without even exerting too much effort. It's just that 'The Man's' idea of a well-rounded education wasn't compatible with his list of priorities.

He seethed and brewed from the back of his Biology class, ill permitted scalpel in hand, his lab partner thrummed with the life and excitement that had been robbed from one of the nameless bodies in one of Charles's jars, or perhaps from one of the bodiless names in Charles's ledger.

The frog in front of them needed to be sliced down the middle, voided of its insides and then suspended in the Mason jar full of noxious liquids.

Maybe it was the whiff of embalming fluids that broke down the clinically white walls of his school building and replaced them with the dark, dank, prison like walls of his basement.

Blood squirted everywhere as the scalpel slid in-between the long thin bones of Sally Maywhether's left hand. Tate's grip was firm, manic, determined and the part of him that could think clearly realized that 'it slipped' wasn't going to cut it. It also had time to wonder if maybe he really wasn't as perfect as his mother though. Maybe he had serious mental health problems.

* * *

Two weeks of academic suspension was assigned almost on the spot, and it was the worst thing the school board could have done.

Tate got home that day to the rewarding sound of cheers from the voices in his head; the ones that only spoke up quite so loud when he was in that house.

He knew he had done right by them, all of them. He could feel the twisting, seeping pain of the walls themselves lessen because of his act of vengeance.

Now he knew how to end their suffering. How to set them all free.

* * *

The basement was a funny place. Nothing was ever where you left it, but you could always find just what you needed.

With his eyes focused on the shotgun in his hands, he walked straight into the flared length of a dark blue trench coat that had been hung over an exposed beam.

There was no going back now.

* * *

Tate could hear his mother crying outside the doorway as the SWAT team descended upon his bedroom. She was screaming bloody fucking murder and that's just what he would give her.

Murder.

A true death.

A final death.

Because as he reached for the 38 caliber stashed under his pillow, he was calm, he knew the secret. His bullet riddled body was on a collision course for the floor and there was a police officer desperate for motive, clambering towards him, but Tate didn't care about any of that. He almost smiled with his final breath, the words "I'm free," dying on his tongue.

* * *

Tate woke up on the basement floor with no recognition, no clue where or why or when he was. He had only the throbbing sensation in his head that spread like sickness down his spine and through his limbs.

Nora's clucking tongue was the first thing he heard. He had a new kind of life now and a new kind of mother to disappoint. It was a toss-up who, between the two of them, had a harder time coming to terms with his failure.

"They're laughing at you now."

"Who?"

"The ones who sung your praises," She sounded smug, like she thought she was funny, "The ones inside the walls."

the next chapter will pick up where this one has left off, and cover until AfterBirth


End file.
